Hamas FIRESTORM Blows Up Israeli Soldiers; IDF Admits Casualties, 32 Gazans Killed Near Aid Site
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First Post
an hour ago
- First Post
France, UK's recognition of Palestine will open Pandora's Box of terrorism
Independent Palestine today would be a failed state and a toehold on the Eastern Mediterranean for Turkey, Iran, or other terror sponsors read more On July 24, 2025, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would recognise Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly in September. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer subsequently said the United Kingdom would also unilaterally recognise Palestine unless Israel accepted a ceasefire with Hamas, never mind that even Qatar and Egypt today acknowledge Hamas blocks a ceasefire and that the original October 7, 2023, attack occurred during a ceasefire. Macron and Starmer virtue signal. They know that an independent Palestine today would be a failed state and a toehold on the Eastern Mediterranean for Turkey, Iran, or other terror sponsors. The French and British move would also empower radicals at a time of political transition: Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is 92 years old and in the 20th year of his elected four-year term; he has selected no successor, and so Palestinian factions manoeuvre for position. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD By handing Hamas a victory and allowing it to claim that its actions enabled independence, both Paris and London show Hamas tactics work and allow it to claim victory. If Palestine wins independence due to Hamas terrorism, but the peaceful movements in Somaliland, South Yemen, and the Syrian Kurds languish, every potential separatist group—legitimate or not—will learn the lesson that terrorism works. India will pay the price. Today, Hamas' greatest financial benefactors—Turkey and Qatar—are also increasingly invested in promoting and legitimising Kashmiri terror. The same groups Qatar funds to promote anti-Israel polemics on campus also stigmatise Hindu student associations or berate Indian academics into silence. Nor is Kashmiri separatism the only terrorist cause Indians will face. On the streets of Europe and on Western college campuses, Khalistan is an increasingly popular cause. Students are too naïve to realise the prominence of Sikh extremists is not organic but rather greased by Pakistani and perhaps Turkish and Qatari money. Not only Pakistan, but also Turkey and Qatar now believe that by either increasing terrorism—against international targets—or by promoting false narratives of victimhood and human rights violations, they can sway G7 members to legitimise terrorism and embrace terrorists' goals. Hamas fooled the world with a narrative of famine. The New York Times tweeted out a story featuring a photograph of a skeletal child to its 55 million followers; it tweeted the correction—that the child had cerebral palsy and a congenital malady that caused malnutrition—on an account with only 80,000 followers. Get ready for the bankers for Hamas terrorism to start promoting equally dishonest anti-India propaganda. The Manipal calumny about anti-Christian religious persecution was just a dry run. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Paris and London have opened a Pandora's Box of terrorism. Western progressives are useful idiots for terror sponsors; academics, Western journalists, and human rights activists despise strength and embrace any movement that claims victimhood. Terror sponsors, meanwhile, are experts at determining which tactics and narratives are most effective. Paris and London have ended any debate for terror sponsors; Hamas is a model. Terrorism works. The West's moral equivalence can transform narratives and interpretations over even the most horrific terrorist attacks. India should beware. Macron and Starmer may not yet realise it, but they have now transformed India into the world's biggest target for terrorists. Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Firstpost.
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Business Standard
an hour ago
- Business Standard
Israeli military intel goes back to basics with focus on spies, not tech
Humiliated by the Hamas attack that devastated Israel 22 months ago, the country's military intelligence agency is undergoing a reckoning. The service is making profound changes, including reviving an Arabic-language recruitment program for high school students and training all troops in Arabic and Islam. The plan is to rely less on technology and instead build a cadre of spies and analysts with a broad knowledge of dialects — Yemeni, Iraqi, Gazan — as well as a firm grasp of radical Islamic doctrines and discourse. Every part of Israel's security establishment has been engaged in a process of painful self-examination since October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas operatives entered Israel from Gaza, killing 1,200 and abducting 250 others — and setting off a brutal war in which an estimated 60,000 people have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, with many more going hungry. Yet even as debate continues about who was at fault and how much Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew in advance of the attacks, the intelligence branch has accepted the brunt of the blame. The agency had a 'fundamental misunderstanding' of Hamas ideology and its concrete plans, said a military intelligence officer, laying out the changes and speaking under standard military anonymity. While the service was aware of Hamas' scheme to capture military bases and civilian communities near Gaza, even watching militants rehearse in plain sight, the assessment was that they were fantasizing. Analysts concluded that the Iran-backed Islamist group was content in its role as ruler, pacified by foreign donations and well-paid work for some Gazans in Israel. The failure to meet the enemy on its own terms is one that Israel's security apparatus is determined never to repeat. 'If more Israelis could read Hamas newspapers and listen to their radio,' said Michael Milshtein, who heads Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center, 'they'd understand Hamas was not deterred and was seeking jihad.' The renewed focus on language and religious training represents what the intelligence officer calls 'a deep cultural shift' in an organization where even top officers rely on translations. The aim, the person said, is to create an internal culture 'that lives and breathes how our enemy thinks.' Yet Milshtein and others say that for this to succeed, it will require significant, society-wide changes. Although Arabic is offered in public schools, most Israelis study English instead. Silicon Valley looms large for ambitious young people, who learn little about countries only a few hours away. The challenge lies in convincing Israelis to focus more on the region — its cultures, languages and threats — and less on global opportunities. Israel grew comfortable and rich seeing itself as part of the West, the thinking goes, when it needs to survive in the Middle East. That hasn't always been the case. In the first decades of its existence, Israel had a large population of Jews who'd emigrated from Arabic-speaking countries. The nation was poor and surrounded by hostile neighbors with sizable armies, so survival was on everyone's mind. Many of these emigres put their skills to use in the intelligence service, including Eli Cohen, who famously reached the highest echelons of the Syrian government before he was caught and executed in the 1960s. (He was recently played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the Netflix hit The Spy.) Today, Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties with Israel, and Lebanon and Syria are weak states with little capacity to challenge Israeli might. The supply of native Arabic speakers has dwindled. Israelis whose grandparents came from Iraq, Syria and Yemen don't speak Arabic, and Israel's two million Arab citizens aren't required to serve in the military. Some Arabic-speaking Druze do go into intelligence, but they make up less than two percent of the population. As part of the intelligence changes, the service is reviving a program it shut down six years ago which encourages high school students to study Arabic, and plans to broaden its training in dialects. The officer mentioned that eavesdroppers were having trouble making out what Yemeni Houthis were saying because many were chewing khat, a narcotic shrub consumed in the afternoon. So older Yemeni Israelis are being recruited to help. It's also channeling resources into a once-sidelined unit whose function is to challenge mainstream intelligence conclusions by promoting unconventional thinking. The unit's work is colloquially known by an Aramaic phrase from the Talmud — Ipcha Mistabra — or 'the reverse may be reasonable.' More broadly, the service is moving away from technology and towards a deeper reliance on human intelligence — such as planting undercover agents in the field and building up the interrogations unit. This breaks with a shift over the past decade towards working with data from satellite imagery and drones, and goes hand-in-hand with another change that was made after Oct. 7. While the country's borders used to be monitored by sensor-equipped fences and barriers, the military is now deploying more boots on the ground. These new approaches will not only require more people, said Ofer Guterman, a former officer in military intelligence currently at the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence, but people who are 'more alert to different arenas.' Prior to the Hamas attack, he said, 'there was a national perception that the big threats were behind us, except an Iranian nuclear weapon.' Now that that has been proven false, he believes that Israel needs 'to rebuild our intelligence culture.' To explain what this might look like, he distinguishes between uncovering a secret and solving a mystery. At exposing a secret — where is a certain leader hiding? — Israel has been excellent, as shown by its wiping out of the Hezbollah leadership in Lebanon last fall. At unravelling a mystery — what is that leader planning? — it has lost its way. Acquiring the kind of knowledge needed for this requires deep commitment to humanistic studies — literature, history and culture. And he worries that Israeli students have developed a contempt for the rich cultures of their neighbors. That too, he says, has to change. At the same time, not everyone is persuaded that the planned changes are the right ones. Dan Meridor, a former strategic affairs minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who wrote a landmark study of Israel's security needs two decades ago, says the wrong conclusions are being drawn from the Hamas attack. 'The failure of October 7 wasn't a lack of knowledge of the verses in the Koran and Arabic dialect,' he says. Rather, he believes that Israel is viewing its neighbors only through the lens of hostility. 'It's not more intelligence that we need,' he added, 'it's more dialogue and negotiation.'
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Business Standard
an hour ago
- Business Standard
Statehood a distant dream for Palestinians as nightmare unfolds in Gaza
Plans announced by France, the United Kingdom and Canada to recognise a Palestinian state won't bring one about anytime soon, though they could further isolate Israel and strengthen the Palestinians' negotiating position over the long term. The problem for the Palestinians is that there may not be a long term. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects Palestinian statehood and has vowed to maintain open-ended control over annexed east Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and the war-ravaged Gaza Strip territories Israel seized in the 1967 war that the Palestinians want for their state. Israeli leaders favour the outright annexation of much of the West Bank, where Israel has already built well over 100 settlements housing over 500,000 Jewish settlers. Israel's offensive in Gaza has reduced most of it to a smoldering wasteland and is pushing it toward famine, and Israel says it is pressing ahead with plans to relocate much of its population of some 2 million to other countries. The United States, the only country with any real leverage over Israel, has taken its side. Critics say these countries could do much more Palestinians have welcomed international support for their decades-long quest for statehood but say there are more urgent measures Western countries could take if they wanted to pressure Israel. It's a bit odd that the response to daily atrocities in Gaza, including what is by all accounts deliberate starvation, is to recognize a theoretical Palestinian state that may never actually come into being, said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University's Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies. It looks more like a way for these countries to appear to be doing something," he said. Fathi Nimer, a policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, says they could have suspended trade agreements with Israel, imposed arms embargoes or other sanctions. There is a wide tool set at the disposal of these countries, but there is no political will to use it, he said. It's not a completely empty gesture Most countries in the world recognised Palestinian statehood decades ago, but Britain and France would be the third and fourth permanent members of the UN Security Council to do so, leaving the US as the only holdout. We're talking about major countries and major Israeli allies, said Alon Pinkas, an Israeli political analyst and former consul general in New York. They're isolating the US and they're leaving Israel dependent not on the US, but on the whims and erratic behavior of one person, Trump. Recognition could also strengthen moves to prevent annexation, said Hugh Lovatt, an expert on the conflict at the European Council on Foreign Relations. The challenge, he said, is for those recognising countries to match their recognition with other steps, practical steps. It could also prove significant if Israel and the Palestinians ever resume the long-dormant peace process, which ground to a halt after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office in 2009. If and when some kind of negotiations do resume, probably not in the immediate future, but at some point, it puts Palestine on much more equal footing, said Julie Norman, a professor of Middle East politics at University College London. It has statehood as a starting point for those negotiations, rather than a certainly-not-assured endpoint. Israel calls it a reward for violence Israel's government and most of its political class were opposed to Palestinian statehood long before Hamas' Oct 7, 2023, attack triggered the war. Netanyahu says creating a Palestinian state would reward Hamas and eventually lead to an even larger Hamas-run state on Israel's borders. Hamas leaders have at times suggested they would accept a state on the 1967 borders but the group remains formally committed to Israel's destruction. Western countries envision a future Palestinian state that would be democratic but also led by political rivals of Hamas who accept Israel and help it suppress the militant group, which won parliamentary elections in 2006 and seized power in Gaza the following year. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose authority administers parts of the occupied West Bank, supports a two-state solution and cooperates with Israel on security matters. He has made a series of concessions in recent months, including announcing the end to the Palestinian Authority's practice of providing stipends to the families of prisoners held by Israel and slain militants. Such measures, along with the security coordination, have made it deeply unpopular with Palestinians, and have yet to earn it any favours from Israel or the Trump administration. Israel says Abbas is not sincerely committed to peace and accuses him of tolerating incitement and militancy. Lovatt says there is much to criticise about the PA, but that often the failings of the Palestinian leadership are exaggerated in a way to relieve Israel of its own obligations. The tide may be turning, but not fast enough If you had told Palestinians in September 2023 that major countries were on the verge of recognising a state, that the UN's highest court had ordered Israel to end the occupation, that the International Criminal Court had ordered Netanyahu's arrest, and that prominent voices from across the US political spectrum were furious with Israel, they might have thought their dream of statehood was at hand. But those developments pale in comparison to the ongoing war in Gaza and smaller but similarly destructive military offensives in the West Bank. Israel's military victories over Iran and its allies have left it the dominant and nearly unchallenged military power in the region, and Trump is the strongest supporter it has ever had in the White House. "This (Israeli) government is not going to change policy," Pinkas said. The recognition issue, the ending of the war, humanitarian aid that's all going to have to wait for another government.
